Advances and increased availability of surveillance technology over the past few decades have made it increasingly common to capture and store video footage of retail settings for the protection of companies, as well as for the security and protection of employees and customers. This data has also been of interest to retail markets for its potential for data-mining and estimating consumer behavior and experience. For some large companies, slight improvements in efficiency or customer experience can have a large financial impact.
Several efforts have been made at developing retail-setting applications for surveillance video beyond well-known security and safety applications. For example, one such application counts detected people and records the count according to the direction of movement of the people. In other applications, vision equipment is used to monitor queues, and/or groups of people within queues. Still other applications attempt to monitor various behaviors within a reception setting.
One industry that is particularly heavily data-driven is fast food restaurants. Accordingly, fast food companies and/or other restaurant businesses tend to have a strong interest in numerous customer and/or store qualities and metrics that affect customer experience, such as dining area cleanliness, table usage, queue lengths, experience time in-store and drive-through, specific order timing, order accuracy, and customer response.